Finally, a QOTW made for me.
I have only ever been to one music festival.

However, it was so fantastic that this year will mark my fifth consecutive attendance. I speak of the no-longer-sponsored-by-Carling Reading Weekend Festival. Christians have Christmas, Muslims Ramadan and Hindus Divali but this is the lynchpin of my calendar year.

When I leave Reading, I enter a period known as the “Post-Reading blues.” This is most severe immediately after the event although last year my mate Bill had a week-long free house to take the edge off. It peaks and dies during the frantic, high-pressure rush to buy tickets in March, at which point you enter “Pre-Reading blues” instead.

First, I wanted to post dozens of short stories about my time at Reading. I then realised that, without the context of the festival, they were meaningless and a tad boring. So then I set upon the idea of a compendium of stories but that would be far too long. So I’m compromising. You’ll find other stories scattered about this QOTW but this is the tale of my first ever night there.

~~~ (multitude of wavy lines) ~~~

August 25, 2005. I didn’t know it yet, but this, the day before my sixteenth birthday, would change my life. We decided to go to Reading because Iron Maiden were headlining. Originally we planned to see them in Paris but decided to go to Leipzig, Germany, instead. Then we changed our minds and decided Holland was a better option. These we even bought tickets for before Maiden were announced as Reading headliners and we snapped the tickets up.

Having packed the night before (severely overpacked as it happens, it being our first festival), we set off. Petley came in his dad’s car (his dad driving, Petley Jr being 16 at the time) and we bunged in our rucksacks. Three of our friends had gone ahead to set up our monstrous nine-man tent (only £100 and it lasted for three Readings before we gave it a drunken Viking funeral on the last day of 2007).

But first, a detour. Today we had to collect our GCSE results – this sheet of paper could make or break our festival. Would we be drinking to drown our sorrows or to celebrate our supreme intelligence?

Petley and I picked up everyone’s envelopes and set off to Reading. On the way we opened them. I had passed all but RE (considering my exam was a scathing attack on organised religion I was hardly surprised) and Petley had matched me. Initially he was very disappointed in his results before realising that he was looking at Iain’s. To pass the time through the hoards of traffic we played hangman on our GCSE certificates.

Finally we were deposited on the streets surrounding the field of dreams and we hoisted our luggage to follow the grimy crowd. We entered via the furthest Brown entrance. Our friends were in Green and if you’ve been you’ll know that’s about as far as possible. We trekked over safe in the knowledge that we’d find a freshly-assembled tent and a cold beer. Actually the tent was on the floor and our mates were drunk but everyone passing their GCSEs perked us up and we set it up. Petley and I rapidly caught up drinking and before we knew, it was 5pm and we were hammered.

We spent the night drunkenly meeting our neighbours including a group of Mancunian students, one of whom was jaw-droppingly fit, and a strange ginger man who sat on a chair staring at us all weekend. We even wrote a song for him to the tune of Bon Jovi:
“Wooah-oh, he’s got ginger hair
Wooah-oh, livin’ on a chair!”
In addition I went on a drunken wander and befriended a random group of strangers. This resulted in Martin and Egghead coming back to our tent after getting some food and having this conversation:
“Where the fuck is Matt, Egg?”
“Here isn’t he?”
“Well Iain and Petley are asleep there but no Matt.”
“He wouldn’t have wandered off on his own.”
“Hang on, I’ll ring him… yeah, Matt? Where the fuck are you? You’re WHAT? Christ!”
“Shit, what happened?”
“He says he’s with a girl!”
“No fucking way.”
No, I didn’t get any. She told me after that she would’ve if she was single but I think we all know that’s bollocks. Anyway…

Friday inevitably rolled around as it is want to do. Egghead had drunk a tad too much (20x 330ml bottles of Stella’s finest Artois as a 5’5” 16-year-old) and was feeling the effects – I woke up to the sight of him, head between knees on a camp bed, puking his guts out into our washing bowl thingummy. The five of us recognised that we’d just experienced one of the best nights of our lives.

I was then rudely interrupted by a phone call from my granddad, of all people.
“Hello?”
“Hello Matt, top o’ the mornin’ and a point o’ Guinness*!”
“… yes?”
“I was just ringing to say happy birthday.”
“Happy bir- oh, fuck, yeah. Cheers.”

A night so good you forget your birthday the next day? That got me hooked. Since then I’ve been to three more Readings and I’m going this year. Each have been fantastic and you can look forward to a multitude of stories from me over the course of the week.

You poor bastards.

Length? Four days but five if you get an Earlybird ticket for the Wednesday.

*He's Irish. He didn't actually say that but it was a clever narrative device to explain his ethnicity.
(MJPerry was crude but clickable at, Fri 5 Jun 2009, 1:22, 1 reply)

I'm going this year sooo...
*click*
(SoneMe, Fri 5 Jun 2009, 12:12, closed)